Thursday, July 2, 2015

Version 15.07 of Shotcut is now available for download. Here is a quick rundown on the new features and changes with details to follow:

4K UHD support

5 new video filters:

Old Film: Dust

Old Film: Grain

Old Film: Projector

Old Film: Scratches

Old Film: Technocolor

5 new audio filters:

Bass & Treble (3-band graphic equalizer)

Band Pass

High Pass

Low Pass

Notch

Added Insert Track and Remove Track

New default Encode settings produce a better quality H.264 MP4 file

Composite now defaults to on/enabled for new video tracks

Shotcut has been able to do 4K for a while now if you made a custom video mode or correctly use automatic mode. However, there were a few things we wanted to do before making it official. First, you really need to be using a 64-bit build, and we delivered that for Windows in the previous release. For this release, we added 4K video modes to the Settings menu and extended our support for Blackmagic Design 4K SDI & HDMI devices (tested output with Intensity Pro 4K).

The new audio and video filters were produced by two teenage daughters for a summer job/project! These old film video effects can be considered toy filters. The film grain effect does not try to emulate any real film stock, and the Technocolor filter does not try to faithfully reproduce the 20th century Technicolor processes. It merely intends to approximate the look. Therefore, our spelling with an 'o' is intentional to avoid any false claims and association with the trademark.

Often, we get asked "how do I export?" To which we sometimes reply, "Encode > Encode File > enter a filename ending with .mp4" as beginners or casual users do not want to figure out a preset or custom settings to use. However, that did not always produce great results. The new default Encode settings are setup to produce a good - but not big - MP4 for any resolution and frame rate. This means it no longer defaults to using the filename extension to choose format and codecs. Previously, it would produce a 2 Mb/s average bitrate file, which did not look good for 1080 or higher. The new default uses a quality-based variable bitrate making it more convenient and easy to output for modern devices and Internet sharing.

Another frequently asked question is how to make a picture-in-picture or make a new video track use the alpha channel (transparency). It seems most people are using additional video tracks for overlay/compositing. Therefore, we decided to enable composite by default for additional video tracks. If you are not using the video track for that and do not like the decreased performance as a result, you can simply click that 'C' button in the track header to turn it off.